Q: Technology Victory

In one of the game setup screens, there is one where you can select what winning conditions are allowed.

One option that is on by default is "Alien Tech Victory". If this one is enabled, the result is that if a race other than yours beats you to finishing Final Frontier, they somehow are able to prevent you from evolving to the next level of existence as well, and because of this you can no longer win a Technological Victory in that game.

Therefore, the game continues, and if you want to win it, you'll have to accomplish a military, cultural, or alliance victory. (Assuming you haven't disabled any of those when you were setting the game up.)

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Thanks.

Drat! I just want this game to end.

Well, the Drengin did reach what, for you, would have been a victory condition. In fairness to the AI, you could just declare them the winners and stop playing the game. Hand over all your planets if what you want is to be able to submit the loss to the metaverse for some reason.

When you don't want to loos you have several options.

You need to ally with all remaining AIs to end the game. e.g. ally with the Dregin and culture flip* all others. Or build excaliburs and terror stars and whipe them out. Or ally with all of them (give them gifts every three month, like technology, money e.g. 500BC fo 50 month or even planets and ressources, until they offer an alliance)

* - build culture palaces in sectors adjacent to theirs
- build all influence wonders, archivements, improvements you can
- buy all influence ressources you can and max them
- colonize class 13 and 14 planets near by the AI planets

In the menu there is also the option to retire.

Anyone know if it's as bad as losing?

I used it a couple of times when it was clear I had no chance of winning. If you look at my metaverse scores you'll see the two times I retired.
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The Dregin and I each had half the map and were evenly matched. It would have taken forever to win/loose so I retired. I would have been happy to have officially lost when the Drengin researched "Final Frontier" first.

@Crusher:
Good question !

Version 1.05 did not include that option, but as I´m now playing 1.20 I was just curious and tested that button (in order to learn how my present progress goes).

Will there be special notifications at the end of the game or by submitting to metaverse, even when I´ve eventually won (or maybe score reduced etc...) ?

I don't think so. But you can submit the same game only twice to the metaverse.